Robert P Baird writes beautifully. His article on Adam Tooze 'the crisis whisperer', published by the Guardian, is a joy to read.
In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time
i.e. 30 Jan 2025.
as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy.
What Conference was this? There was a 'European way of growth' conference back then. But it was in Cracow.
In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”.
this isn't a reference to sodomy. The notion is that stimulating middle class consumer demand is key to successful macro policies.
They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage.
We will die, but we will scream and shit ourselves as we do so.
Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.
China does the shipbuilding. Let us investigate why we don't any longer.
It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe.
He thought Varoufakis wasn't stupid and evil. He was wrong.
Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath,
from which Europe didn't recover which is why its share of world GDP is in the crapper.
Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.
He is a fucking historian. That's low IQ.
Though he still teaches history, Tooze is also widely acknowledged as an expert on the infrastructure of global finance and the economics of the green-energy transition.
This is like saying a guy who writes about Caesar is a kick ass Roman centurion.
He is the rare commentator who can speak credibly about the political economy of Europe,
he can talk to other shitheads. Does he move markets? No.
the US and China, and he has been an outspoken advocate on issues ranging from central-bank reform to Palestinian rights.
The more advocacy Palestine receives, the worse off its people. 'Central bank reform' just means the Government should print money and bail out places which have been bankrupted by their politicians.
In addition to being the author of five books, he writes regular columns and essays for outlets like the Financial Times and the London Review of Books, hosts podcasts in English and German, and publishes a wildly popular and influential Substack newsletter called Chartbook, which he sends out daily in English to more than 160,000 subscribers, including Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, and Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary.
In other words, he is stupid and vacuous but not as mad as Summers or as consistently wrong as Krugman.
Chartbook also goes out in a Chinese-language version that, Tooze estimates, received 30m total impressions last year.
10 trillion Chinese flies eat shit. This proves that eating shit is good for you.
Yet for all that, and despite being motivated occasionally by what he calls “an energy of wanting to put the world to rights”, Tooze is not generally regarded as an eager controversialist. (Last year, Krugman sounded delighted to see “the normally calm Tooze come across as a bit angry” in one of his Chartbook posts.)
Apparently, Krugman got 'mad as hell' back towards the end of 2024 when the NYT asked him to write much less for them.
In person as in his work, Tooze prizes connection and synthesis, a tendency that helps explain why he is equally at home, and equally welcome, talking to activists in South Africa,
kill Whitey. Not me, South African Whitey.
or senators in Washington,
useless ones- sure
or development economists in the West Bank,
till violent 'setttlers' redevelop their asses
or financial executives in London,
who are planning to move to Dubai unless they are so useless Dubai doesn't want them.
or Chinese Communist party officials in Beijing,
they can always find some use for a useless idiot
or finance ministers in Berlin.
which is the definition of stupidity.
It was notable, then, that after joining the Brussels panel, Tooze didn’t waste much time before stating flatly that the Biden team had “failed in its absolutely central mission, which was to prevent a second Trump administration”.
Kamala was supposed to be a prosecutor. Why couldn't the Dems lock up Trump? Also why didn't they reform the Supreme Court?
Not only that, he argued, but the dismantling of the liberal world order – something discussed with much rueful lamentation at the conference – had been hastened, not hindered, by the Biden veterans on stage. As he’d written a few months earlier, Tooze saw Biden no less than Trump aiming “to ensure by any means necessary” – including strong-arming allies – “that China is held back and the US preserves its decisive edge”.
To be fair, the Chinese overcame all obstacles on their own. With hindsight, Biden should have soft-soaped the Chinese. But, at that time, it was not known that they could overcome their own vulnerabilities and create very effective threat points against US & Europe.
“I feel the need to say something,” Tai said, when Tooze was finished.
Which is like the corpse at the wake feeling the need to say 'I'm not dead. Please don't bury me'.
She recalled a parable Martin Sheen had delivered in front of the White House during the 25th anniversary celebration of The West Wing, the haute-liberal political fantasia that remains a touchstone for professional Democrats.
Trump, in his own way, is laying claim to that mantle. He wants people to think he has stopped eight wars and thus should get lots of Nobel prizes.
Sheen’s story concerned a man who shows up at the gates of heaven and earns an admonishment from St Peter for his lack of scars. “Was there nothing worth fighting for?” St Peter asked the man.
'The others didn't think so', the man replies, 'because I killed them before they could start any rough stuff. That's how come I converted millions to Christianity.'
Tai turned the question on Tooze: “Where are your scars, Adam? I can show you mine.”
Tai cuts herself and then cries herself to sleep. This is because, like Kamala, she believes mean girls in the West Wing are said nasty things about her.
Recalling this exchange several months later, Tooze was still flabbergasted. “I’d be silly if I didn’t admit that it was a bruising encounter,” he told me recently, in one of three long conversations we had over the past year.
Trump wouldn't have been bruised. He'd have said 'Tai cuts herself. Bitches be kray kray.'
Nevertheless, he said, “it confirmed my underlying theory about what was going on. These were a group of entirely self-satisfied American liberal elites who were enacting a morality tale in which Sheen and The West Wing and that whole highly sentimental vision of power and politics is a central device. She says this, I think, meaning to sound tough, like, ‘I’m the warrior. Who are you? You’re just some desktop guy.’
She was a trade negotiator. He was a professor. But was she any good? No. Was he any good? Who cares? He taught useless shite.
Which just shows how little she understands what I’m saying, which is: ‘You people are a bunch of sentimental schmucks who don’t understand that you lost.
No. They did get that they had lost. Was it because Kamala had a vagina? Sure. Let's go with that. The alternative is to admit Biden was senile in which case the question arises why he wasn't forced out of office by his Cabinet.
If you had any self-respect, you would not be on any podium again, ever, sounding off about anything.
No. Dems should be talking to EU ministers and getting them to form a cohesive group so as to gain countervailing pressure over Trump. Maybe this has in fact happened. The EU, working in concert with BRICS, starts retaliating a few months before mid-terms such that cost of living goes through the roof and key swing states start experiencing lay-offs. That way Trump turns into a lame duck. Congress can impeach him at leisure. SCOTUS, too, becomes cautious because if they persist in backing Trump, the Dems will take their revenge by taking away life-time tenure when they return to power.
Because comrades, if we were in the 30s, I would have taken you out and shot you. You fail like this, you don’t get to come back and show off your wounds.’”
Tooze has gone mad. He thinks he is Stalin.
Though it’s difficult to remember now, there was a time when Joseph R Biden was hailed as a president with the transformative potential of a Franklin D Roosevelt or a Lyndon B Johnson.
He started off well. People thought that, like LBJ, he would have networks within both Houses which would assure passage of 'build back better' bills on the scale of the New Deal or Great Society.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden had positioned himself explicitly as the moderate alternative to both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. After the election, however, he quickly made clear that he did not intend to govern as a doddering centrist placeholder. He seemed particularly keen to flatter the aspirations of the left wing of the Democratic party, which, despite Sanders’ defeat, was experiencing its most significant resurgence in half a century.
In other words, Biden himself was the biggest enemy of the rising element in his party. Sadly, this meant Kamala too was tarred with the same brush.
The early days of Biden’s presidency saw what appeared to be a new rapprochement between centrist liberals and the rising left. Tooze, a self-described “left-liberal”, was perhaps the representative intellectual figure of this development.
i.e. stupid and living in a fantasy world.
Some of this had to do with Crashed, which established him as a leading economic commentator and found an admirer in Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats.
Progressives are furious with Schumer.
Some of it also had to do with Tooze’s longstanding interest in climate policy, which was shaping up to be a central focus of the Biden administration.
Obama had a 'Green New Deal' consisting of pissing money against a wall.
And some of it, too, had to do with a belated but intense engagement with Twitter, which he joined in 2015 at the urging of his daughter (then a teenager) when he was in his late 40s, where he soon gained a huge following.
of stupid people.
Five years after Biden’s inauguration, the political atmosphere in the US could not be more different. Yet Tooze remains no less relevant as an intellectual force.
To whom? The brain dead. Dems need to win the mid-terms. By all means, coordinate with EU finance ministers. Pick out key constituencies where lay-offs caused by a trade war will alter electoral outcomes. Suggest ways to target big donors to Trump over their overseas assets or operations. Some may call this treason, but if treason prosper then it isn't treason at all.
Whereas once he had personified the appeal of high-technocratic expertise – the feeling that if you could just read widely enough and understand deeply enough, you might be able to chart a sensible approach to crises like climate change
coz writing for the Guardian magically creates solar panels- right? The fact is, China stands alone as the biggest and best at battery production and tech. Look at the recent trade agreement with Canada. China sells Electric Vehicles and Canadian farmers avoid bankruptcy. But the terms of trade move against primary producers. China wins and goes on winning.
– today Tooze stands as one of the more eloquent analysts of a new and confusing world order.
No. He was and is a shithead. This is a nutter who thought Varoufakis had a point!
“My basic wager in interpreting modern history is to bias toward the thought that it might be unprecedented,” Tooze told me.
Everything has a precedent- including stuff which genuinely is unprecedented precisely because unprecedented shit has always gone down.
“I’m interested in the way the present continuously breaks us.
Does it also sodomize us and say 'you like it don't you, you fucking retard bitch?'
It challenges us.
To suck its dick? Kick it in the goolies and go back to sleep.
It does not, when you’re honest and serious about it, confirm what you know.”
Unless what you know is true and useful.
In The Deluge, his 2014 book about the legacy of the first world war, Tooze described the way early-20th-century world leaders confronted “the radical novelty” of a world in which the US economy was newly dominant.
They didn't confront it. They played 'extend and pretend', till the money spigot ran dry.
These days, Tooze spends most of his time tracking a dynamic that he believes is similarly unprecedented and consequential: the rise of China as an economic superpower.
Which is like the rise of Japan over which Trump got his knickers in a twist back in the Eighties. Don't forget he was with Ross Perot at some points during the Nineties.
In Tooze’s view, what he calls the “radicalism of the present”
meaningless gibberish
keeps many people, including policymakers, from seeing the world as it actually is.
We don't know what the world 'actually is'.
Hence his argument to the Brussels panel that Biden and his staff were not the defenders of the liberal world order that they imagined themselves to be.
Because they were shit. But that was already obvious. Why rub their noses in it?
Hence, too, the claim he made in this newspaper, a few weeks before the 2024 election, that “Bidenomics [was] Maga for thinking people”.
Pissing money against a wall is what 'thinking people' like- if they are fucking libtards.
And hence his belief that – even though the past year has seen the darkest warnings of the Biden and Harris campaigns come to gruesome fulfilment – the American liberal obsession with Trump is too often framed in terms borrowed from decades past.
It is silly to say 'Trump is a Nazi'. The truth is he is a werewolf who only sodomized Zombie Hitler once- but it it happened in Vegas and, anyway, Hitler signed an NDA.
“Why can’t we have new bad things?” he asked me at one point. “Like really new, really bad things?”
Kamala as POTUS? Sadly, people would have to vote for her to make this happen.
Though he only leads two courses a year at Columbia, Tooze still thinks of himself primarily as a teacher. His job, he told me, “is to help people understand the situation that we’re in, as clearly as we can. It’s to go, ‘Look at this, look at this: what does this tell us if we pin our eyes open and don’t flinch and don’t blink?’ And then to say that out loud.”
And try to get paid for it. That's what matters. Any nutter can go on substack.
A glance at Tooze’s family tree or his sterling CV makes it tempting to imagine his career as an untroubled glide among warm updrafts
that's good prose. Is it true? No. He did Econ at Cambridge at the wrong time. The future lay with Econophysics or, if you weren't smart enough for that, an MBA and then a soft landing with a hedge fund.
carrying him along from the day he was born. In conversation he does not obscure his many privileges: the fact, as he puts it, that he is “the product of five generations of university-educated women”, or that his mother’s parents were wealthy cosmopolitans who published influential reports on nutrition and took Le Monde as their daily newspaper, or that his father was a prominent molecular biologist.
That's 'professional middle class'. Highgate or Oundle are good schools but not Eton or Harrow good. Anyway, smart peeps Tooze's age made billions in private equity. Their second home is a castle.
Yet Tooze’s upbringing was more complicated than that sketch implies. His maternal grandfather, Arthur Wynn, was a civil servant who had also been – as Tooze and his family learned alongside the public in the 1980s – a Soviet spy. Tooze still speaks fondly of Arthur and his wife, Peggy; they are the joint dedicatees of Wages of Destruction, his 2006 book about Nazi economics. But he also describes Arthur as “a tough, tough, mean son of a bitch”.
Why highlight your connection to a Commie ? I suppose, at the time, the thing was fashionable. Mandleson's dad got him to join the Hampstead Young Communist League and to do voluntary work in Nyerere's Tanzania.
Tooze describes his father, John, as “a guy that got shit done”
He was of working class origin. A brilliant man who studied something worthwhile.
and also as someone with a well-deserved reputation for what we now call toxic masculinity: “I regularly would have people come up to me in life-science centres and say, ‘Does your name mean what I think it means?’ And then the reaction would be, ‘I’m sorry,’ or, ‘I hate your father.’”
He'd worked with James Watson. He had Yankee 'get up and go'. The Europeans didn't have the same work-culture. Also, the fellow was a bit of a pleb.
It was John’s work that took the family to Heidelberg in 1974, when Tooze was six years old. West Germany was reckoning with its Nazi past, and Tooze says that the ambient political atmosphere weighed heavily on his youth. “I spent a lot of time identifying with the perpetrator, asking myself what kind of a Heydrich I would have been.”
He wouldn't have been a Heydrich- unless he joined the Navy. Given his Dad's background, he would have been a Mengele trying to find more effective bio-weapons like those which featured in Alastair Maclean's 'the Satan bug'.
At that time in that place, the question was far from abstract. “I went to school with Albert Speer’s grandson.
Speer had been released in 1966. Oddly, his books became popular.
We were the big science dignitaries that arrived in the little village outside Heidelberg where the Speers lived, and they made us welcome. My parents were invited to dinner, and the Speers said, ‘Do you need some furniture? Here’s a table.’
I'd have demanded a lampshade made from human skin.
Literally the whole time we were in Germany we were eating off Albert Speer’s table.”
I was born in West Germany. My nanny had been in the Hitler Youth and had married a guy who was only de-Nazified in the late Fifties. The only German thing about me is my sense of humour. My jokes are no laughing matter.
The difficult legacy of the difficult men in his family ultimately steered Tooze away from economics, his first academic love.
It is mathsy. If you are stupid you do Econ History. Kwarteng's PhD was in Econ History. He was as stupid as shit.
Though he was fascinated by the field, and good at it, he also recognised in it “an absolutely toxic culture”.
Toxicity doesn't matter. Stupidity does. Work with cretins and you become a cretin. Tooze must have come across Wynne Godley's 'stock-flow consistency' model at Kings. The problem is that nobody knows what either are. Accountancy is all about fudging the numbers after sitting with the auditors and considering what the markets want to hear. Toxicity is generally highly correlated to arbitrariness and ipse dixit assertions- i.e. bullying other people till they nod their heads.
Tooze sees a therapist. I wonder whether this was because Godley saw a therapist- the crazy Masud Khan.
By the time he graduated he knew he had to leave the discipline. “I had a terrible relationship with my father, and I couldn’t be around that kind of academic man,” he says.
His dad was doing something useful. Did he understand that Cambridge Econ was useless? Perhaps. Cambridge said 'markets don't matter. Prices are administrative and cost based. Quantities depend on demand'. This is a caricature of Hicks 'fix-price' which was fine when, as Hicks thought, the Government was effectively setting the profit rate, but it was not fine after Bretton Woods collapsed and Exchange Controls were evaded or abolished. Godley & Cripps were protectionists (like Trump!) demanding import controls to 'make Britain great again' in the Seventies. Sadly, voters understood this meant a slippery slope to the reintroduction of rationing.
With this resolution in mind, Tooze moved back to West Germany in 1989, just in time to see the Berlin Wall come down. That experience was something other than exhilarating:
Fuck off! It was exhilarating. Even ugly dudes got laid that night.
“I was quite shaken by it, to be honest, because I realised at that point that the West German bubble that I’d grown up with was disappearing before my eyes.”
It didn't disappear. It prevailed. The problem was that young men in parts of the East did not prosper. Women left. Wolves moved in. Fucking a wolf is little fun.
Like Brexit a quarter-century later, Germany’s reunification “massively destabilised” the hybrid identity he’d built for himself.
The guy is a hysterical clown. Blame daddy for not stroking his hair and saying 'you aren't stupid and you aren't studying worthless shite'.
In the newly unified Germany, Tooze did historical research that ultimately prompted him to undertake a doctorate in history at the London School of Economics.
If you aren't studying Econ at the LSE, you are announcing your stupidity to the world. Still, maybe the guy would turn out to be a dynamite econometrician. But that's not what happened.
The change in field suited him, but it did not exactly settle his existential unease. It was not until he got a teaching job at Cambridge, after his PhD, that he felt entitled to start assembling a library of his own. “Before that I felt so insecure. I didn’t feel I should own anything permanent.”
Coz Commies might expropriate it?
Though he was writing books for general audiences, even as late as 2015 Tooze was still, in his self-deprecating description, “a secret name that grad students knew about”. Crashed changed all that. The book had its origins in a seminar on the philosophy of history he taught at Yale, which included a group of students who were involved in left politics.
useless idiots who wanted a paranoid theory of history. Did you know Obama was secretly white? Also, his real name was Barry not Barak. Trump lied about his being born in Nairobi so as to make him look cool. The truth is he was blonde and blue-eyed and attended Vassar.
“Working with that cluster really just changed my life,” Tooze says, not least because it reawakened in him a political impulse that had more or less fallen dormant.
This is like the film 'Blue Angel' with Marlene Dietrich, except some smelly lefties play the part of the siren.
The class showed Tooze that there was an opening for a comprehensive account that would help his new friends on the left understand what had happened during the financial crisis.
Govt. took on the downside so the US had a long bull run. Europe didn't. Stupid Krauts were left holding the dirty end of the stick.
Gillian Tett, Tooze’s fellow columnist for the FT and the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, his alma mater, told me that “before 2008, it was incredibly hard to get a picture of how the entire global financial system worked as a single organic unit”.
It doesn't work as a single organic unit. That's why some countries were unaffected.
In Crashed, Tooze analysed the global economy as a matrix of interrelated corporate balance sheets,
It can be no such thing because of impredicativity- i.e. one balance sheet depends on another balance sheet.
rather than as a point-to-point comparison of national economies. Tett says that this approach gave him “a very good overarching framework” for analysing how money actually moved around the world, which proved crucial for understanding the crisis.
We already knew how 'money' moved around. What changed was who took over the down-side.
Joseph Stiglitz, a colleague of Tooze’s at Columbia who won a Nobel prize in Economics in 2001, says that being a historian gave Tooze “a big advantage” in analysing the crisis.
But being a cat would give you an even bigger advantage. This is because it is difficult to refute the argument that 'miaow miaow miaow miaow'.
Modern economics tends to focus on mathematical models, an approach that, while fruitful in some cases, often struggles with multifaceted events like the financial crisis.
Modern accountancy uses arithmetic. That's why it struggles with multifaceted events like the Zombie apocalypse.
“The world is complicated, and when you put all the pieces together, the mathematical model becomes so difficult that you can’t understand it,” Stiglitz told me recently.
He can't understand shit. He probably still believes in the Greenwald-Stiglitz theorem.
For Tooze, by contrast, “the freedom from the constraints of writing down a fully articulated mathematical model gave him the ability to give a true story of what was going on”.
Anyone can tell stories. If yours is true, you must have a better Structural Causal Model which means you ought to be a fucking billionaire.
Crashed was published in 2018, two years after Trump’s first electoral victory prompted many Democrats to reconsider the party’s longstanding embrace of neoliberalism.
That happened when Hilary abandoned support for TPP under pressure from Sanders.
Against the foundational neoliberal presumption that the point of politics is to serve the market, Tooze supplied a 600-page demonstration of the “irreducibly political” foundations of the global economic system.
Sub-prime was 'affirmative action'? That's a story as good as any.
Crashed was especially popular among Democrats who wanted to argue that Obama’s fiscal caution in the wake of the 2008 crisis was responsible for the rise of Donald Trump.
Obama should have tanked the economy. Trump would have gone broke. He'd have been offering blow-jobs at truck-stops instead of running for the White House.
Tooze thinks the situation was more complicated than that, but he makes no secret of the fact that he wrote Crashed “under the influence of left Dems from whom I’d acquired this narrative of the basic conservatism of the Obama response to the crisis”.
In other words, Tooze wrote some modish shite- a kind of Godley sectoral analysis for dummies- aimed at a particular market and did well by it. But David Icke made more money.
In 2019, Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats, invited Tooze to Washington DC, to address a caucus luncheon. Schumer’s interest reflected a new determination on the part of Democrats in Washington to test the Keynesian dictum that “anything we can actually do, we can afford”.
If you are borrowing to do it and can't repay the debt thanks to higher earnings- you can't afford it.
Tooze recalls the senator engaging him in a conversation after his keynote. “Schumer said: ‘OK, Tooze, am I hearing you right? Are you saying that what we should be doing here is focusing on a massive investment surge? We should not be prioritising debt as a main concern? I said, ‘Yeah.’ He looked around at three people in the audience and said, ‘Do you hear what this guy’s saying? Next time we have a chance, we go big.’ I walked out and went, ‘Jesus Christ, did that just happen?’”
To be fair, Biden was actually less profligate than the first Trump administration. But cost of living took a bigger hit.
Crashed vaulted Tooze into what he calls a “global existence” that has him travelling frequently and speaking earnestly about the community of people he runs into at conferences and in airport lounges around the world
He is what Arthur Koestler called a 'call girl'.
. Though not a journalist – with a few exceptions, his contemporary histories rely on documents more than interviews – Tooze shares the journalistic impulse to see “policy processes reasonably up close”.
i.e. schmoozing with Senators
He also clearly enjoys being a sounding board for people with the power to set national, continental and even global agendas: “They have the sense that you understand the way in which these pieces move. And so you become a point of confidence, somebody they feel they can speak to openly because you clearly get it,” he told me.
You are the 'amen corner' for stupid pork-barrel proposals.
When Covid hammered the global economy in March 2020, Tooze recognised echoes of the events he had written about in Crashed. “The crazy thing was,” he told me, “we all knew we were playing a version of 2008, but it wasn’t quite the same and somebody needed to explain how. There’s a handful of people in the world that are going to try to explain this to people, and one of them is me.”
He failed.
A month later, in the Guardian – and later in his book Shutdown, published in 2021 – he did just that, detailing the unprecedented measures central banks deployed to stave off a total collapse. All through the early months of the pandemic, he says, “there were days when I was publishing two things a day: the Guardian, the New York Times, the FT. This was before I was doing Chartbook. I wasn’t sleeping.”
He was sleep-walking.
In Germany, when Olaf Scholz was finance minister, Tooze was invited to speak on panels to provide intellectual support for Scholz’s efforts to move the ministry away from its traditional fiscal conservatism.
Hyperinflation has a bad rep. Also, why not appoint Varoufakis as your Economy Tzar? What could go wrong?
And in the spring of 2020, during the delicate negotiations over an EU pandemic-recovery plan, Tooze acted as an informal messenger between the German and Italian governments.
No wonder the EU response was so utterly shit.
In the US, meanwhile, Schumer continued to use Crashed as a policy playbook. “In the spring of 21, I started getting these texts from friends on the left wing of the Democratic party going, ‘You’re not going to believe this. I’ve just been in a meeting with Schumer and he said, we all have to read this guy, Tooze, on going big. Schumer was going, like, do you know this guy? T-O-O-Z-E?”
as opposed to cooze. Same thing really.
Tooze says that Schumer’s staff stayed in contact with him throughout the drawn-out negotiations over what would become the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill.
Hilarious! It raised inflation and brought Trump back to power.
In 2022, he was summoned to the White House for consultations. He accepted the invitation – largely, he says, because “it’s the one and only time I’ll ever get to the White House, so whatever, let’s go and see.”
Trump should invite him for a slap-up meal there as a thank you.
The encounter was disillusioning. Already by that point Tooze had been frustrated with Biden on a number of fronts, including the compromises of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was vastly smaller than originally intended,
i.e. did not cause hyperinflation
“conservative in its political framing”, and “larded with concessions to fossil fuel interests”.
Thus leaving the lights on.
Yet nothing seems to have disturbed Tooze quite as much as seeing what he calls the “narcissism” of the Biden team at close proximity.
They were low IQ shitheads.
In all his many years of therapy, he told me – he has been seeing a therapist multiple times a week for a decade – there were only two occasions on which he sought help specifically in response to political incidents. One was Brexit – “if there’d been an armed-resistance wing I would have wanted to be Michael Collins,”
he was killed by the more extreme anti-treaty wing.
he says – and the other was his encounter with the Biden administration.
“Part of what motivated the unhinging of my relationship with the Biden people was being invited on to calls with their climate team,” he told me. He cited a conference call with Jake Sullivan,
quite well regarded. It was Blinken who was the blinking idiot.
Biden’s national security adviser, that took place in 2023, not long after a Chinese balloon drifted into US airspace and sparked an international incident that Tooze described in Chartbook as “the first, bona fide war scare of our new era of Sino-US confrontation”.
Its a balloon for fuck's sake. It isn't even the balloon from Steven King's 'It'.
On the phone call, he said, “It was just, ‘Oh Jake, you guys are rock stars.’ This was in the middle of the balloon incident, where we were sliding towards war and everyone in DC knew it.”
If they go crazy over a balloon, fuck will they do if they see a kite?
One of Tooze’s friends, the novelist Zoe Dubno, told me that Sullivan is often “enemy number one” at Tooze’s dinner parties, where many of the guests, like Sullivan, are products of elite Ivy League educations: “He hurts everyone because they’re like, ‘That could be me. If we decided to be completely compromised fuckheads, that’s the kind of evil that is available to me.’”
In other words, he did his job fairly well.
Despite his political flirtations on both sides of the Atlantic, Tooze says he has “a very ambiguous relationship to power”, an uneasiness he traces back to his lifelong effort not to be like his father. “The thing that haunts me is that I know perfectly well that I could be that kind of person in the world,” he said.
No. You studied useless shite.
For these reasons, he has tried to maintain an “obliqueness” and a “distance” from power. “I look at myself and say, a system which puts somebody like me in charge is a bad system.”
Nobody has put him in charge of shit.
Not everyone thinks this effort has been successful. In 2019, in the New Left Review, Perry Anderson,
who went to Eton and thus was posher than Tooze, who went to Highgate
the venerable leftist historian,
he is the same age as the Iranian Supreme Leader but less in touch with modern trends.
published a scathing 16,000-word review-evisceration of Tooze that took for its formal targets the loose trilogy comprising Wages of Destruction, The Deluge and Crashed, and ended up attacking his entire modus vivendi.
Presumably modus operandi is meant. But Perry too was bluffing he understood 'stock flow consistency'. The truth is, it is 'anything goes'. Indeed it could end up as MMT. Still back when I was a kid, Godley was considered smart. Could he help the UK? No. He was a reverse Cassandra. Everybody believed nothing could be done whereas it was fucking obvious that there were mechanisms to get rid of real-exchange or real-interest rate uncertainty and thus prevent a 'shakeout' turning into permanent deindustrialization.
Apparently Godley, having advised Lamont after Black Wednesday (i.e. after everybody realised the Treasury had no 'wise men' at least not when compared to Soros), went off to 'Bard College' in America where he co-authored a silly book in partnership with a Frenchman. It is entirely vacuous. It begins thus
The premises underlying this book are, first, that modern industrial economies have a complex institutional structure comprising production firms, banks, governments and households and, second, that the evolution of economies through time is dependent on the way in which these institutions take decisions and interact with one another.
Why is this nonsense? The answer is because it doesn't mention foreign competition. Why did the UK or, later the US, stop being the world's biggest ship-builder? It is because other countries did it cheaper or better.
Our aspiration is to introduce a new way in which an understanding can be gained as to how these very complicated systems work as a whole.
We say it works well if we are doing better than our rivals. If we aren't, we say it doesn't work well at all.
The fiercest aspect of Anderson’s essay addressed Tooze’s politics.
Why isn't he a Communist? At the very least he could stab a banker or two to death. I don't say he should also eat them. Chaps who went to Highgate can be very picky eaters.
All three books, Anderson argued, share a telling fault: namely, a failure to reckon adequately with the deep forces that gave shape to the events he described. In Wages of Destruction and The Deluge, Anderson says Tooze approaches each of his subjects “in medias res, dispensing with a structural explanation of its origins”.
That 'structural explanation' is that Capitalist get up in the middle of the night and enter the hovels of the proles and drain them of their vital bodily essence through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus. That why the working class are too dazed to resist exploitation and surplus value extraction.
Anderson is a Marxist, and so it’s not particularly surprising that he was unimpressed by Tooze’s self-description as a “left-liberal”, a compound phrase that, he noted, “has often, perhaps typically, proved unstable”. Nor was it difficult to see how someone with Anderson’s theoretical views would decide that Tooze was no true leftist at all.
Also, he isn't really a nice black girl from Shanghai who is in a committed lesbian relationship with a Guatemalan goat.
By the end of the essay, however, that latter judgment has expanded well beyond the content of Tooze’s books into a sneering indictment of his whole public existence. The breadth of interests, audiences and sympathies that for so many of Tooze’s admirers mark his signal virtue stood for Anderson as proof of his political unreliability.
Very true. The dude was invited to the White House. Did he eat Joe Biden? No. He made some excuse about not having brought along the bottle of HP Sauce his proletarian grandfather had bequeathed him and left early.
“Tooze spreads himself widely, and his accents
those of Hampstead rather than Eton?
and formulations vary from place to place,” Anderson wrote. “That’s often the price of a growing reputation [and] shouldn’t be taken too seriously. To criticisms of inconsistency, he can in any case reply quite reasonably that nothing he has written falls outside the parameters of a basic commitment to liberalism as it has developed in the west from the time of Wilson and Lloyd George to that of Geithner and Macron.” (In the context of the New Left Review, these points of comparison could hardly be more damning.)
The verse I wrote (in imitation of Jonathan Swift) on first reading the New Left Review was
Here's a proof of Lefty sense.
Here Lefty wit is seen
With no values worthy of defence
they bring out a new magazine!
I didn't know at the time- I was 14- that the magazine was older than I was. Also, it had no pics of nekkid ladies.
Anderson’s implication that Tooze is essentially keeping two sets of books – one set of accounts for his lefty graduate students, another for his discussion partners at Davos – becomes the basis for his essay’s bitter final judgment: “In today’s world, the question can be asked: how far does that differ from running with the hare and hunting with the hounds – indignant sympathy for the hare, awed admiration for the hounds?”
Lefty graduate students will chase after and eat Davos Man. Tooze couldn't even take a bite out of Biden.
Tooze does not hide the devastation he felt on reading Anderson’s essay,
he cried and cried. Did he also cut himself? No. That's why he has no scars to show.
or the fact that he still thinks about it often. He told me that his disorientation had much to do with his longstanding admiration for his antagonist.
Perry Anderson was even stupider and more useless than his brother.
Tooze has subscribed to the NLR since his 20s, has written for it several times, and says he always read Anderson’s essays “religiously”.
I wish Anderson were my daddy. He would gently lower my drawers and wreck my rectum very lovingly. Benedict Cumberpatch would play me in the sequel to Patrick Melrose- Tooze as cooze.
Perhaps predictably, Tooze rejects much of Anderson’s critique. He is also plainly offended that his attempt to be honest about who he is, and where he’s coming from, was taken by Anderson as a kind of shiftiness, or even hypocrisy. Over the past decade or so, Tooze’s politics have shifted notably leftward.
Start from irrelevance and move rapidly towards absurdity. It's the classy thing to do- more particularly if daddy didn't wreck your rectum.
Yet Tooze still feels it imperative to acknowledge “how deeply I am the product of the circumstances I was raised in”.
If I'd gone to a posher skool, my rectum would surely have been more effectively wrecked.
As he put it to me at his office, last April, “I take that more seriously than the average academic leftist. Because I don’t imagine that by virtue of thinking a bunch of radical thoughts, I can get more than a little bit of the way towards escaping my professional upper-middle class identity. I’m a senior professor at an immensely rich private university. Where do I get off kidding myself about this?”
Also I iz White and don't have to sit down to pee. How is that fair?
In another conversation, in October, Tooze noted that he had done “a lot of activism around green politics and central banking and naming and shaming the IMF economists”.
This is like my activism around claiming to be better at twerking than Beyonce.
His voice rose to an exasperated pitch as he imagined a conversation with Anderson: “It’s like, ‘Show me your cards. Where the fuck have you been on any of these issues? What’s your position on climate? Where were you with the Green New Deal? Where have you been on Gaza?’”
Also, fuck were you doing during the War of the Roses? Not having been born then is no excuse.
More surprisingly, Tooze said that Anderson’s attack helped him clarify his own principles and practices. Anderson used the phrase “in medias res” as a jab at Tooze’s neglect, as he saw it, of the deep political and economic forces that shaped his narratives. Yet Tooze has come to embrace in medias res both as “a very succinct summation of the challenge that I’m particularly interested in” and as a simple but profound description of the basic human situation. In his view, there is no escaping the middle of things: every one of us is born, lives and dies in a rushing flow of events that precedes us and will outlast us.
Shitting and pissing are part of a simple description of the basic human situation. 'In medias res' is a description of a particular type of narrative which doesn't begin 'ab ovo'- with the egg from which Helen was born. In looking at an event- e.g. the financial crash- you need that egg- i.e. a theory of why a class of assets (e.g. 'sub-prime') got mispriced. Saying 'stocks & flows' is mere handwaving. There was a mechanism design fault. Diagnose it. Fix it. Simples.
He told me that he is not a Marxist in part because he thinks treating a body of theory produced in the middle of the 19th century as “the be-all and end-all” – a stable point from which one might stand outside history and discern its hidden forces and patterns – is “a lazy way of dealing with reality”.
Sadly, reality has been rather lazy in dealing with us. It should have slapped us straight ages ago.
To accept the radicalism of the present, he says, means acknowledging that you can’t understand history before it happens:
The owl of Minerva flies by night- as Hegel said. He was early nineteenth century.
“If you’re in the middle of shit, you don’t actually know what the shit is that you’re in the middle of.”
Yes you do unless 'shit' is a metaphor. But you do know what is causing you to want to retch- unless you are merely virtue signalling.
Last spring, Tooze became an American citizen. The decision predated Trump’s return to office and had mostly to do with the precarity Tooze felt previously: “If you’re in a green-card situation, you do not want to be arrested. And it is remarkably easy to get arrested in this country.” Nevertheless, he admits that he considered leaving the US after Trump was re-elected. He was particularly frustrated by the situation at Columbia.
The had a good British-Egyptian President who had played hardball as Director of the LSE. They should have stuck with her.
On the one hand, he was not eager to watch, as he had during Trump’s first term, another “ding-dong battle between Trump and indignant New York Times-reading liberals” on the faculty. On the other hand, he’d been appalled to see how many of his colleagues, including serious leftists, had gone quiet during the Gaza turmoil on campus.
How fucking appalling do you have to be to get appalled that appalling shitheads are making less noise?
Tooze himself has been vocal in his defence of the rights of both Palestinians and pro-Palestinian protesters;
and any other nutcases who want to disrupt the teaching of useful subjects
an online watchlist featured video screenshots that showed him in an orange faculty vest at a 2024 Columbia protest. He acknowledged that he felt a freedom to speak his mind for “thoroughly bourgeois reasons”.
Islamists may cut his head off but they won't sodomize his corpse because they too went to Highgate.
Thanks to Chartbook, he said, which brings him more income than his salary at Columbia, “If I get fired from this job, I walk away. I’m totally fine.”
No. If he gets fired for plagiarism and sucking off little boys, his income from Chartbook will collapse
Still, he was dismayed at how much the fear of losing their accumulated academic privileges had “constrained people in what they’ve been willing to say. They are so fucking scared of losing that. It’s disgusting how scared they are.”
Very true. Use the wrong pronoun and suddenly you are unemployable.
Tooze says he decided to stay in the US in large part because his daughter lives here. He was confirmed in that decision, however, by news that three of his former colleagues at Yale, Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley, were moving to Canada.
That's a good reason not to go there.
“Their decision just radically clarified it for me. Because it’s absolutely the wrong decision in every respect: it’s wrong politically, it’s wrong ethically. Even if, as Tim Snyder has claimed, it has nothing to do with politics, the optics are terrible. They should have deferred the move for 12 months.”
These aren't good looking people. The optics are already terrible.
Tooze is still reluctant to use the word “fascist” to describe Trump’s government,
Fascism only exists if the police can't handle a Communist threat. The US never had that problem.
even as he recognises “the possibility of a kind of escalation here towards something truly catastrophic”.
That's nuclear Armageddon. But that could happen under any POTUS.
Tooze told me that his increasingly lonely resistance to that term has much to do with not wanting to shoehorn the present into the past. When I pressed him on the question, though, he also admitted a frustration with the kind of people who invoke the analogy, and the reasons they invoke it.
Jason Stanley invokes it coz he's of Jewish heritage. All Tooze can whine about is that his grandpappy went to Oundle and he too was privately educated.
He allowed that “fascist” might be a useful way to emphasise the radical character of Trump’s rule but said he still didn’t like the way the analogy encouraged the kind of smug moral satisfaction that he came to despise in the Biden administration.
You should be cutting yourself and crying yourself to sleep every night. At least see a therapist twice a week- for pity's sake.
He noted that he keeps several models of Soviet T-34 tanks in his office at Columbia to remind himself, and his visitors, that it was not high-minded western ideals like democracy and freedom that defeated the Nazis in the second world war. “If you’re willing to admit that it was the Red Army that beat fascism,” Tooze said, somewhat grudgingly, “then you can have your fascism analogy.”
Armies didn't matter. Munitions and machine guns and tanks and fighter planes did. The superior industrial might of the Allies prevailed. But, against Japan, what worked best was nukes. Since then, whatever regime you have, the way you get to keep it is by having lots of nukes and effective delivery systems.
Over the past year, in all the many parts of the Toozeosphere – the newsletters, the podcasts, the columns – Tooze has diligently tried to make sense of Trump’s second term. He has covered Trump’s tariffs, his Gaza peace plan, his abduction of Venezuela’s president, and his soya bean deal with Xi Jinping. He has also wrestled publicly with one of the central questions that any analyst of this bizarre period in American history must confront: namely, whether the possibility of “making sense of Trump” is its own kind of delusion – sanewashing, as it’s sometimes called. Tooze doesn’t think so. Though Trump himself is “obviously a degenerate buffoon”, Tooze’s analysis goes further. “If it’s true that the key to decoding what’s going on is facelifts and boob jobs at Mar-a-Lago, why? How do we make sense of that?”
Follow the money. Maduro's kidnapping means ten billion extra dollars for a big Trump donor.
Yet in our conversations as well as in his writing, he often seemed less than energised whenever the subject turned to Trump. He acknowledged as much. Though he sees Trump undertaking a “profound reshaping of American society”, Tooze also made it clear that he interprets Trump as a symptom rather than a cause of the US’s decline. And that decline, while consequential, is far less interesting to Tooze than the concomitant rise of China, which has recently become his all-consuming obsession.
Once again, this is about industrial economics. The truth is China had risen militarily by the end of the Sixties and Nixon acknowledged this. Could it imitate Taiwan and South Korea? Sure. That's it. That's the whole story. I omit a long passage about Tooze's belated discovery of China's rise.
Tooze thinks there are two available choices. One involves a “truly escalated hard-power competition”.
Which is happening and will continue any way.
The other option involves finding an accommodation with Chinese partners that, as Tooze puts it, “include Stalinists – proper Stalinists”.
Fuck that. Sullivan said the US no longer supported any type of regime change in China. It would not seek to intervene in its internal affairs.
He told me that while he sometimes gets accused of being a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist party, he is
a useless idiot
not naive about the regime. In Tianjin this summer, he was overcome by a “sadness” when seeing a massive conference centre that was under construction.
The Chinese have big conferences. What has changed is that more and more countries will send delegations to them.
“It’s as though you were watching the pyramids being constructed. The pyramids are very impressive, but you don’t get to see the forced labour.
Archaeologists don't think there was forced labour. Working on the pyramids was well rewarded.
China right now is like watching the pyramids being constructed in real time. You see all of the inequality. You see the Pharaonic ambition. All along the edge of it you’ve got these people sleeping in their cars and slumped over their mopeds.
That is 'frictional'. China has housing over-supply.
“The moral weight of that is what we have to wrestle with,” Tooze says.
Masturbation isn't wrestling.
Still, it’s clear which option he prefers. “My deep conviction is that the west needs to accept the end of its era of global domination.
Which the UK did before I was born.
That doesn’t mean that we have to give up our own values,
or that we have to suck off elephants- even if those elephants are bleck.
or not defend our own perfectly legitimate interests in our own system, or that we should not be absolutely clear-eyed about the nature of the Chinese regime.” What it does mean, he says, is embracing a deep realism of a sort that the west – and the US in particular – has never exactly been famous for.
Trump did it by saying there is now just a Group of 2- US and China.
Actual progress, he believes, will require us to accept the humbling imperatives of the unprecedented present moment.
Sadly, accepting stupid shite doesn't entail any type of progress.
As he put it in his New School lecture: “Ours is a bit part and not the starring role.
The US still has about 16 percent of global GDP. It is still the tops in transoceanic force projection. Trump is the star of the movie but, if he loses the mid-terms- it is a shitty Jerry Lewis movie rather than Dean Martin as Matt Helm.
We’re not the love interest.
That's the co-star.
This song is not about us.”
Tooze's song is 'it's my party, I will cry if I want to.' Greater Narcissism no man can show than to say Biden's crew were nauseatingly narcissistic because fuckers like Sullivan made quite a good fist of serving the National interest.
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